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Monday, December 14, 2015

Still Crawling Forward + A Minor Rant

Word count for Recompense is now up to 271,200. I need to pull back and exercise some self-discipline. I intend to start a new trilogy, or at least add more books to the series anyway, so there's no point in trying to write it all at once.

Meanwhile, I am trying to make sure that my characters maintain consistency, and remain at least halfway believable. This is the foundation for today's rant.

I was watching Grimm last week, the last episode before it goes on Christmas break. I am wavering on whether to even bother picking up the show again after the first of the year. The wildly unlikely personal interactions and behaviors are getting painful to watch.

It's not like this is new knowledge. Every speculative fiction writer. I mean every speculative fiction writer knows that the more improbable the setting is, the more realistic everything else has to be. Otherwise people will snort and turn to something else. You have to make your characters REAL. You have to make your characters someone that the reader/audience will give a rat's backside about. Like them or hate them, they have to ring true to life.

Once again I say, as I have said so often before, that every story at its most basic heart is simply a case of 'once upon a time something happened to someone and this is what came of it'. Stories are about the characters, and what happens to them, and how they react to what happens to them. Without interesting characters that the reader/audience/listener can identify with, all you are doing is writing a dry recitation of events. Rather like a newspaper article.

Either that, or you are writing a (grimace) literary work. Which means that you are not really telling a story at all, just spewing out some verbal self-indulgence all over the page.

The Unfortunate Woods Series

The forest isn't cursed, no matter what the rumors say. It's just having a long run of bad luck. A really, really, long run of bad luck.

Recompense - Book Three

Pete answers the queen’s call to return to his tortured homeland. Jess comes with him, praying every step of the way that returning will not destroy them once and for all. There is an ancient debt that must be paid, and neither gold nor blood will cover the cost.

Who I Am

A famous theologian said that we are not sinners because we sin, we sin because we are sinners. Well, I am not a writer because I write, I write because I am a writer.

I have lived and worked in both city and country, and done more kinds of jobs than you might believe possible. I currently live in N. OH with my beloved spouse and our youngest kid; the older one got married and made a break for it. We also have a terrier who's dealing with a few issues.

Feel free to contact me at morganalreth@gmail.com. I promise to read it all, and answer as many as I possibly can.